Tuesday, June 26, 2012

My name is Sue Mach.
I have been an English instructor at Clackamas Community College in
Oregon for over fifteen years. In
early June, as faculty were madly preparing final exams and grading end-of-year
papers and projects, we received an e-mail from the registrar’s office
informing us that our grade distributions would be made publicly available to
an online company called MyEdu, that claims to provide data to students to help
them “manage” their college careers.
This information includes degree planning, scheduling, credit
assessment, and of course faculty ratings and grade histories. All of the data requested by MyEdu is
public information, so according to our school lawyers, there was nothing we
could do but fork it over. We were
moreover informed that MyEdu was not in violation the Federal Educational Rights
and Privacy Act (FERPA) because it
was not requesting information about individual students.

Because of my association with Oregon Save our Schools, and
the research I’ve done for my play A
Noble Failure, I became immediately concerned. A visit to the MyEdu website begins with a bombastic video scare tactic informing students and
parents that although 93% of college freshmen believe they will complete their
degree in four years, only 36% of them actually do. Sometimes it takes longer and I guess that’s more
expensive. The video went on to
show how MyEdu can save students and parents thousands of dollars by performing
the services I mentioned. They
boast that they’ve helped over 2 million students “graduate faster.”

Mind you, there’s absolutely no documentation to support
these claims, and graduating faster doesn’t necessarily mean becoming an
employed and informed citizen faster.

When I clicked on Clackamas Community College on the MyEdu site, the faces of five smiling students
appeared —Michael, Maya, Stephan, Ava and Aubrey— with messages inviting
students to create profiles to link their “projects and presentations” to the
general public, provide course feedback, or recommend a good chemistry
instructor. Funnily enough, when I
clicked on Mount Hood, Chemeketa, and PCC, and pretty much every other college
in the state, Michael, Maya, Stephan, Ava and Aubrey were students there
too! And they really wanted some
more students to create profiles to, well, provide the site with their personal
information.

On the surface it’s easy to dismiss MyEdu as a lame website
that few students will access because it’s poorly designed and offers nothing
to them that isn’t available in their advisor’s office. A further inquiry into the history
of the company is far more distressing, however, revealing a partisan agenda
that’s closely tied to efforts to diminish college professors, reduce college
to a “stop and shop” experience, and privatize post-secondary education.

In 2008, Michael Crosno, investor,
former business instructor, and member of Rick Perry’s re-election committee,
purchased and rebranded a “rate-my-professor” knockoff called Pick a Prof. MyEdu got a further boost in 2010
when Mitt Romney’s pals at BainCapital invested 5.5 million dollars in the company. In August 2011, in a move that reads
like a blueprint for the current UVA scandal, the Perry-appointed Board of Regents at the University of Texas—despite
the reservations of university president, and with no input from either the
public or their investment advisors—voted unanimously to invest $10 million in
MyEdu. In exchange, the U of T
would receive customized websites for each of its academic and health campuses,
as well as a 22.5 percent stake in the company. Oh, and it just so happens that a former Chancellor, William
Cunningham, is an investor and his son John is Senior Vice President of Information
Architecture, and a founding MyEdu member.

One of the key players in the U of T/MyEdu deal was AlexCranberg. Cranberg, CEO of the recentlyindicted Aspect Energy corporation, is a school voucher advocate who
created the Alliance for Choice in Education, a nonprofit group in Denver, CO that
pushes for ALEC-scripted legislation and backs legislators who pursue a privatization agenda. Even more disturbing is Cranberg’s
connection to ALEC-backed Jeff Sandefer,
architect of the controversial Texas Seven Solutions for Higher Education, which pretty much calls for a reduction in research funding,
merit pay based on student evaluations, and a gutting of all things humanities
related.

So my questions are as follows. How can MyEdu claim to be in compliance with FERPA when
simply registering with the website means a student is offering up his/her academic
information to be data mined? How
can academic institutions let themselves be bullied by an organization that
clearly has ideological partisan connections to groups and individuals who can
manipulate instructor data to serve their political and financial concerns?

Though the information schools provide is public, they
shouldn’t give it up without a fight.
It’s like handing your keys to the robbers who want to raid and pillage
your house.